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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

This weekend is the start of the AHIMA Annual Convention happening in Miami, Florida. For those not familiar with the AHIMA organization, it brings together HIM professionals from across the country. Something that I think makes AHIMA unique is that around the HIM conference are multiple days of training and certifications for HIM professionals. I’m always amazed at how much work HIM professionals have to put in to keep up with their certifications and to stay up with things like the ever-changing world of medical coding. HIM definitely doesn’t get the credit they deserve in this regard.

As I think what topics will be hot at this year’s AHIMA Annual convention, I’m most interested to hear what the HIM crowd thinks about the changes to the Physician Fee Schedule and E&M Coding. This is going to be a big deal for healthcare and medical coders are going to be the ones charged with dealing with the changes. Sure, doctors will have to change how they are documenting as well, but verifying that it was documented correctly and making sure the medical coding matches that documentation is mostly done by HIM professionals.

I’m really interested to hear what HIM professionals think about these medical coding changes. What do you think of the new time based coding options? Does this make life easier or not? Let us know what you think and what you’re hearing in the comments. The obvious part to me is that in the short term it’s not going to make medical coders’ lives easier at all. It’s just one more code they’re going to have to deal with and it doesn’t have a history of practices to support what’s acceptable or not. It’s not like these new codes are doing away with the old codes. At least I don’t think that’s how most practices are going to handle these new codes, but we’ll see. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Another big change that could impact HIM professionals, particularly medical coders, are the new remote monitoring and digital care coordination codes. I’ve heard a lot of people saying that these codes show some promise. However, I’m starting to hear overtures that the codes aren’t going to live up to their billing (excuse the pun). What are you seeing when it comes to the new coding for telemedicine, remote monitoring, and digital care coordination?

Outside of these two big topics, I’ll be interested to hear how HIM professionals are looking at security and privacy. It’s become a huge topic in the CIO and healthcare IT world. I wonder how much it will impact the HIM world. There’s always an interesting dance when a breach happens. The HIM world is great at understanding disclosures and HIPAA violations, but breaches often bring out a lot of different people. The reality is that when a breach occurs it needs to be all hands on deck. However, my guess is that many HIM professionals aren’t part of the discussion when a breach occurs. How’s your experience been in this regard? If you haven’t had a breach (lucky you), you should still have some policies and some drills in place to make sure you’re ready. So, you should have an idea of what HIM’s role would be in a breach.

What other things should we be watching for from an HIM perspective? What’s keeping you up at night? What’s getting you most excited about your job? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter @HealthcareScene.